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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
So AI is a great tool. It is a horrible master. And so it does not master us, it serves us. Well, then we better be sharp enough to know how to use it well. And that's part of our biblical worldview.
Narrator:This is the transform your teaching podcast. The transform your teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Doctor. Rob McDowell and Doctor. Jared Piles welcome Doctor. Thomas White, President of Cedarville University.
Ryan:They discuss Cedarville's adoption of CHATGPTEDU campus wide. Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Dr. White, we appreciate you coming back on and joining us. You were last on about eighteen months ago. Yeah. And a lot of stuff has changed.
Jared:The first thing I wanna ask you about, though, are your gaming habits? Because the last time we talked, it was Fortnite pretty much all the time. I gotta ask about that first. Any kind of changes? I know we have important things to talk about, but I wanna talk about his gaming habits.
Thomas White:Yeah. So my son still plays Fortnite, which means I still play Fortnite and that we do duos together. And they created a new shorter season. I can't remember what they call it now, but it's only, like, 36 competitors in it, and it's a smaller map, and it takes a lot less time. So I'm really digging that.
Thomas White:It's not as much quest or build. It's just more shoot and fire. And so More tag. I had 66 crown wins last season which is not shabby for somebody that's my age. But my son had more, but we will talk about that.
Thomas White:And so I'm an xer. I'm not a boomer. I just like to treat so
Rob:many I just thought I'd throw it out at you.
Thomas White:So I do that, and I do clash royale on my phone.
Rob:Like, that's
Jared:Still do that.
Thomas White:I'm in a yeah. It's I'm in a group, like, whatever you call it, with students. And so, yeah, we don't do very well in some of the team competitions, but it's okay.
Jared:We're And related to that, you were doing some research, I'll put it in quotes, research for the esports program. And you just told us before you when you walked in here, we had our first tryouts.
Rob:And he has on a particular shirt.
Jared:Has on the
Thomas White:esports jersey well. They gave me with and it says doctor White on the back, which I have found out gaming, if you have a doctor in front of your name, it's really easy to get your gamer tags because nobody else does.
Jared:It's
Thomas White:true. If you have doctor, you don't play.
Jared:Mine starts with doctor as well.
Thomas White:It's easy. Yeah. So it's just doctor Thomas White. Really? All three of us are using the doctor?
Thomas White:It sounds kinda pretentious. I use it for gaming.
Rob:I use doctor Grizz.
Thomas White:Okay. Well,
Rob:that's cooler than mine. Had a friend call me, hey, doctor Grizz.
Jared:I'm doctor Chunk if you wanna get real into Yeah.
Thomas White:That's legit.
Jared:Now onto the serious talk.
Rob:Now onto the serious talk. So every year, you lead us in meetings before the beginning of the year with faculty and staff. And let us know what the vision is here at Cedarville. Let us know where we're headed. Let us know how we're doing, and it's just a really great time.
Rob:This year, you had a pretty big announcement for the entire campus. You wanna tell our listeners what that was?
Thomas White:Yeah. So the the goal associated with the announcement was for us to implement wisely AI, artificial intelligence across the campus, and so not just in the academic area, but also in the staff area. Mhmm. And we wanna do that in a wise way. And so that's the goal.
Thomas White:The actual announcement that came out of that was that we're the first Christian university to do chat GPT, edu, and a campus wide solution. And so all of our faculty and staff have access. All of our full time degree seeking students have access. And in addition to access, there's also training.
Rob:Mhmm.
Thomas White:And so you have access to the latest models, which right now is ChatGPT five point o. And so I have access to it as well as a few others right now. And so GPT five thinking and GPT five pro as well as legacy models. And so that's what we have access to. The training to me is probably the bigger deal than just the access, you but have to have the access before you can understand what the training's all about.
Thomas White:Right. And so we're doing it. We're not the only school to have an AI solution, but we are the first Christian university to do the chat GPT EDU solution across campus.
Rob:Yeah. That blew a lot of people away. I mean, myself included. And after we looked at and you did as well. You, like, you looked at Instagram, all the social media.
Rob:It was just pretty amazing. The polar responses. I I would say a lot more people in favor of what we're doing than not, but it it definitely created a stir, and and that's one of the reasons why we're here recording with you today. And one of the other questions that we really wanted to kind of just peel the curtain back on is when you were in here with us, you had discussed how you use ChatGPT, what you were using it for. It's been eighteen months, and I'm pretty sure you've had some more interaction with it.
Rob:How would you compare, you know, where you were when we first talked and and where you are now and and what led to you and the cabinet and the school going, yeah, we need to do this.
Thomas White:For me, the realization that it wasn't going away led to a desire to learn about it in every way possible, minus any sinful ways. Right. Right. If those are out there, And I'm sure there are. So I do The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education every morning.
Thomas White:It's delivered into my inbox. I'm looking at what the headlines are, reading the articles I need to read, but trying to make sure I'm up to speed. I don't think a day went by where something in AI was not mentioned in one of those three every single day. The Wall Street Journal is talking about the billions of dollars Yep. And the race, the arms race between the magnificent seven as to who's spending the most money on AI.
Thomas White:And when you see that much money being spent in the marketplace on a technology, which we've never had that in my lifetime. Mhmm. We have tech stocks that are just growing beyond belief, but they've never spent this many amounts of billions of dollars on a single piece of technology. And and then to see NVIDIA and others skyrocket in value overnight Yeah. Seemingly to become some of the most valuable companies.
Thomas White:From my seat that says pay attention, it's time to learn more about this. So every way possible. My wife used it for travel planning. We used it for our vacation. She had, like, a 75 page document for our two week vacation.
Jared:That's amazing.
Thomas White:She had the route she wanted to go. She had CHET GPT give her the best way to accomplish all of those in one day. And so we used it for an assortment of things that were just normal common human things. Yeah. And then I also tried to use it to help develop a class.
Thomas White:So an academic class, I used it to do sermon series and some stuff like that, but I never actually used it. Like, I just used it to see what it would do. Mhmm. Because I really don't believe you can preach a sermon from ChatGPT and be a faithful preacher in doing so. I think the text has to change me.
Thomas White:Right. It has to come from the overflow. It's gotta be internalized. So I'm trying to compare it to say, okay. What would a student do?
Thomas White:Could a student literally just have the right prompts and go into chat GPT and come out with something that I would grade, having formerly taught theology and preaching and other theology classes, and would grade and in what manner would I look at this material? How would I know the difference? And, honestly, it was pretty impressive. I I was pretty sad about how quickly it was able to produce content that was really good. Yeah.
Thomas White:So that's some of it. Like, there's more, but that's some of it. So let's just go Christian class. Sure. So this summer, the second phase of my research into chat GPT, paid subscription, exploring, analyzing, becoming familiar.
Thomas White:So then I decided, okay. I I'm gonna build a Christian leadership class. Was asked to do this by our school of biblical and theological studies. Let's figure this out. So I did not understand Chad GPT well enough to know that I could set parameters around each project.
Thomas White:So I started trying to figure out I wanted to consult these resources. So I had to give me summaries of, like, 30 books. The 30 books I had already read. So every summary, I'm reading the summary determining, is it accurate or is it not? How reliable is it?
Thomas White:What's it missing? What's it got that maybe I missed? Mhmm. Is there something of that nature? But I did it.
Thomas White:I got all all 30. And then I'm like, from that, give me this. Give me all the leadership principles. Okay. Give me how many times it appeared in those 30 books.
Thomas White:And so each of those leadership principles had to appear five times, and then it was give me a scriptural verse that backs up each one of those. One of the bible well enough to be able to sit in judgment on chat GPT. Is this good exegetical work or is this eisegesis? Are you taking this out of context? Does this work?
Thomas White:Mhmm. Was really impressed with what it was able to do. Came back and said, give me a definition for each one. So, eventually, I went from 30 book summaries to 74 pages of notes and about a 150 leadership principles with summaries, bible verses, what books it came out of, and, you know, that adapted into my brain and my thinking and my organizational, way of looking at Christian leadership. So all of that then is part of my exploration into CHET GPT.
Thomas White:And so why did we do it? Well, the two things that I became convinced of is, one, it is not going away. It will be here. It's gonna be here forevermore. And the second thing I became convinced of through my own research, but also through talking to our career services office and other places, is companies are demanding some level of knowledge of AI.
Thomas White:It may not be ChatGPT. It may be Gemini. It may be Gronk. It may be other things. But there's some level of understanding of what's happening.
Thomas White:So for our students who are coming in as freshmen, they have a thousand days. It's four years. I can't imagine or predict where AI is gonna be four years from now.
Jared:Yeah.
Thomas White:But I know they have to be there. Mhmm. So if I'm convinced our students need it, and if I'm convinced it's not going away, the best thing I can do is get the brightest minds that I know all working together on it to try to figure it out. Two things required in that. Number one is access Mhmm.
Thomas White:Which is what we've provided with the campus wide solution. And then number two is training. That training unlocks other conversations. So, you know, we talked about gaming. Just just to go back to gaming.
Thomas White:So if if you're doing Fortnite and you don't understand how you can edit a build, you're at a disadvantage. And somebody comes along and they start editing builds and they start showing you up and you just you're blown away. Mhmm.
Rob:And all
Thomas White:of a sudden, you realize, oh, wait a second. There are whole YouTube channels dedicated to where I can get secret guns and where I can find chests and where I can do different builds. And so you you were fascinated by it. So you start learning about this, which is what my son does. And then he comes in, and he's like, dad, I'll show you where the secret chest is, and you have to do this and that.
Thomas White:I'm like, how did you learn about this? Somebody told me information, training. Mhmm. So, number one, in order to understand that, I had to use it. I had to understand what the buttons did and how the controls worked.
Thomas White:But number two, somebody had to tell me. Mhmm. And then you start figuring things out. Mhmm. That's where we are with AI in my mind.
Thomas White:We've got access, and we need training. And then that training is gonna lead to one person saying to another person, well, can I do this? And they're gonna be like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Here, you do it this way.
Thomas White:This happened with our cabinet team. So our cabinet team, I told them before we went on our summer break, everybody is on a paid subscription of some AI. I didn't mandate which one. In fact, we decided to do different ones. And so different cabinet members chose different AI models, paid subscriptions so we had the highest possible caliber of insight coming to us, and it was their assignment before we got to cabinet retreat.
Thomas White:Learn as much about this as you possibly can experientially. Like, dive into it. Figure it out.
Jared:Full immersion.
Thomas White:The university is paying for your subscription. Don't waste it. Use it. Use it for everything you can think of to use it for. And then when we came back at the cabinet retreat, we talked about that.
Thomas White:And fortunately for us, others like yourself had already been into AI. Micah and our IT team had already been talking to people, and so we had expertise that once we decided what we thought about it, we were able to call in the expertise of others who've been using this for years and bring them into the equation to say, here's what else you need to know. Here's what you need to consider. Mhmm. And then we talked to the AI experts to make sure things work, and all of that led to this decision.
Jared:So how do you see this adoption helping our faculty specifically? So I
Thomas White:think it's gonna vary between how much our faculty members wanna get into it. You're gonna have some faculty members that are gonna jump on this right away. They're gonna utilize it for everything we can possibly think of. Mhmm. How do I make this lecture better?
Thomas White:How do I make it more concise? You're gonna have some that will do, you know, the the chat GPT PowerPoint that they used to try to sell us on it said that you can tie it into Canvas. You can go to the different modules of your class. You can have it analyze your class, and it can look for strengths or weaknesses. Mhmm.
Thomas White:So if I wanted to analyze modules six through eight and tell me, what do I have this too too much overlap? What do I have that's only mentioned once? It's not mentioned enough. What gaps do I have? Because you're tapping into other knowledge bases there as well.
Thomas White:Then I think we have faculty members that will be better teachers because of AI giving them insight. Now they sit in judgment on it. Yeah. But it brings ideas to the table that maybe we haven't thought of, maybe we didn't say it in this way. And so I think it's gonna be helpful in that regard.
Thomas White:Some faculty members may not have notes. They may not ever have thought of wanting to create notes. But now the question arises, and the student's already asking. Can I take a recorder into a classroom and record my faculty's lecture, put that into AI, have AI create notes for me? Mhmm.
Thomas White:That's a question to the faculty member, Yep. And the faculty member has to be comfortable with that, but the faculty member then can do it. Yeah. And they can create notes.
Jared:That's what I plan on doing in mine this semester.
Thomas White:And they can have notes, and then they can have it edit those notes so that it sounds more academic or more polished rather than just speech. And so in addition to that, I really think some of our faculty are gonna use it as a research assistant, which is basically what I did with the Christian leadership class. It was a research assistant. I think some faculty will find great uses for it in that way, and I fully anticipate we'll have faculty and staff that will come to us with resources and uses of it that I haven't thought of and didn't know existed. But you put a bunch of really smart people in a room talking about what can be done, ideas pop up of, oh, can I do this now?
Thomas White:Yep. And the answer may be yes, maybe not yet. Maybe yes, but you shouldn't, and here's why. But those are the conversations I think we need to have as a campus, and that's why I'm really excited to have a lot of smart people thinking about this before everybody else is. A lot of the other universities are either scared of it, resources, dollar allocation, whatever it may be, but they're not diving in with everybody.
Thomas White:Well, I'm actually trying to push the other way. I want everybody to have access, and then I wanna have training that forces everybody to do something with it. Right. Push into it. Right.
Thomas White:I mean, if you don't do anything else with it, let it do your recipes and create your grocery shopping list or something so you can order well, it told me I asked it last night. Give me a recording setup for a basic music recording studio. So it gives it to me, and then it tells me what level do you want this at. Well, I wanted to beginner cheap level. So it gives me the because this is for my son.
Thomas White:He's into music. They gives me the dollar amount and tells me what all I need and where I can do it. And then it says at the bottom in a prompt question, would you like for me to create a list on Amazon so that you can purchase all these things? So it's gonna take me to Amazon Mhmm. And show me exactly what links to click to purchase all of this.
Thomas White:I didn't know we'd do that. I mean, I'm I'm still learning. Yeah. And I'm probably so far behind that people listening to this are going, okay, boomer. Welcome to the party.
Thomas White:But that's alright. Okay, Xer. Xer. Xer. Yeah.
Rob:Yeah. This has been amazing to watch unfold here on campus because we've already had faculty training the day you announced it, and that went pretty well. We had
Thomas White:It was packed. I was surprised at standing room only on a Friday afternoon. Yeah. You and me could have gone home. Right.
Rob:And they were there until the end till we closed. Mhmm. We were at the student training yesterday
Thomas White:Mhmm.
Rob:The last session. With people sitting on the floor. With people sitting on the floor. Yeah. Seats.
Rob:I think in total, we had probably over, I I would say, around 500 students with both sessions, which, you know, you say, well, you know, we have, what, 4,000 students on campus roughly somewhere
Thomas White:in there. Get 500 students to come learn when they can be playing sand volleyball? Or Oh, yeah. I mean, that's
Jared:something Fortnite? Yes.
Thomas White:Yeah. Totally. Yeah.
Rob:But they filled it up.
Jared:I I
Rob:mean, I thought they could have put
Jared:more chairs in there and put
Rob:some stuff But the the the questions, and this is what I would say, the questions that came out of our students, you could see that they were thinking about it. They were taking it seriously, and we got some really great questions. And so I think what you were talking about is that that synergy between people who are using it, really smart minds, and not just our faculty, but our students because we got some extremely bright students. And they're digital natives. Yeah.
Rob:And so I think we're going to I think we're gonna see a lot of great things out of it. Mhmm.
Jared:How would you encourage faculty to then encourage students to use it? And, like, what what do you see the value in there?
Thomas White:So I I honestly think we have to give our faculty time to be comfortable with it before they're gonna encourage the students to use it. Right. And so the faculty have to understand what can this do that would be beneficial for my class or my classroom.
Jared:Mhmm.
Thomas White:And part of the answer to that question, in my opinion, is gonna be it takes away the first level questions. The questions where we are putting shirts on that say, it's in the syllabus. You're tired of telling people to go read the syllabus.
Jared:It's on the previous slide. It's up there.
Thomas White:And so if you're sick of telling students the same basic information over and over, let a GPT do that. Mhmm. And then you get to have a next level conversation with a student that requires critical thinking, that presses into discipleship, that includes life change. Mhmm. And those are the conversations that excite our faculty.
Thomas White:Right. So if we can move past the basic level questions on a test, on an assignment, or anything else, and we can move into a question that really makes a difference in someone's life, I think our faculty member will be on board at that point, and they'll be pressing into students to do this. And, honestly, I don't think most students are gonna need pressing. I think most students are gonna be excited about it because they're already doing some of it. I mean, they're they're using Quizlet and putting in the faculty member's notes and creating their own quiz charts and flashcards and things of that nature.
Thomas White:And so as they're doing it, this just makes it easier. We get chat tied into Canvas, and the notes are there, and we know that this is working right. And then all of a sudden, they click a button and up pops test questions or flashcards or whatever it is, study guides that they need. I think our students are gonna start taking it for granted. I saw from EAB, who is one of our consultants for enrollment, a slide that said it was roughly about 75% of high school students are already using AI for their study skills.
Rob:Oh, wow.
Thomas White:Now 75% of high school teachers are probably not using it in the classroom.
Jared:Yep.
Thomas White:But the students are already using it. So then where's that student gonna wanna go to school? A school that's saying nothing about AI, a school that's saying stay away from AI, or a school that's saying, no. No. No.
Thomas White:We're gonna engage it, but we're gonna engage it wisely and biblically. And I think that's one of the keys is we are gonna have to continually press into our students to do this wisely, rightly, and biblically. So you may have a parent watching the show. And if a parent's watching the show, they're probably some of them may be nervous. I think part of what we're seeing on Instagram is people don't know about AI.
Thomas White:They're scared. They're worried we're not gonna do this wisely.
Jared:We're gonna use all their data. We're gonna harvest it.
Thomas White:I think the number one concern is brain rot. I mean, when you think about Fortnite, it's touch grass. When you think it's Yeah. I mean, there are all these things and sayings that what we have to do and what I want anybody watching this, faculty member or otherwise, student watching listening to this, is we have to have critical thinking skills. And so work is good.
Thomas White:It was created before the fall. AI is not the easy way out because shortcuts never result in excellence, and we want excellence and effort. And so we have to make sure that we are pressing in deeply, that work is a good thing, and we need to do the hard thing just because it's hard. Yep. And we need to be the people who are excellent.
Thomas White:So AI is a great tool. It is a horrible master. And so it does not master us. It serves us. Yep.
Thomas White:Well, then we better be sharp enough to know how to use it well. And that's part of our biblical worldview. I think another issue was it was New York Times or Wall Street Journal one. They said the number one use of chat GPT right now is relationships. If it's so bad in my life that I need a GPT to have a conversation with me, I am in desperate need of a friend.
Thomas White:And so I want our students to recognize that God created humans in the image of God. God expects humans to worship him. Part of our love for others is that we have a conversation with other people. If you know how to use AI and you can look another human being in the eye, smile, and have an intelligent conversation with them and a firm handshake, not a limp fish, then you can have a heads up on all the other people in the world that can't do that. Yeah.
Thomas White:Oh, yeah. And so to parents, we want your students to have critical thinking skills. They can't skip class. They're not gonna be taught by AI instead of a faculty member who loves them and wants to disciple them. We want them to develop all of the good skills that you want them to develop, but we want them to have AI as a tool in their tool belt that puts them ahead of the competition, not behind the competition.
Thomas White:So we are AI savvy, not AI ignorant, so our students get jobs and lead the way in a culture shining as a bright light to a chaotic culture that doesn't have a clue what to think or do.
Rob:Yeah. I think one question that I do wanna ask you, and maybe we can we can end here, is talk to the faculty member, not just here at Cedarville, but talk to the faculty member at other sister schools who carry the torch of Christ. Mhmm. And they're afraid. They're scared.
Rob:They think to some degree that it's the Antichrist or an or the Antichrist tool. And let's just get that out there on the table. It may well be somewhere down in the future. Right? But we can still and should use the tool for God's glory.
Rob:How would you address them? What would
Thomas White:you say to them? So let me back up and and move at this from a slightly different angle. But the question that arises is what does it mean to be human? Can AI replace human beings? Can it replace me as a faculty member, which is part of the fear factor?
Thomas White:Right. My answer to that is no. Right. AI was not created in the image of God. AI cannot pray for me.
Thomas White:AI does not have a relationship with Christ. It does not worship in the same way I worship. And so we are, as human beings, needed, and we can never upload our personality so much into AI that we live forever. A GPT is zeros and ones and numbers and data. It's not human flesh and blood and thinking personality that results in a soul that responds to a god who died for human beings who has the spirit and the breath of God in us.
Thomas White:So Christian faculty members out there who are worried about this, I wanna say to you, this thing may not be morally neutral. It may not be like money where it can be good or evil. It's created by humans who have a sin nature. So maybe you wanna think of this as something that is slightly bent towards the negative aspects of life, more like a political philosophy or an economic philosophy. But even political and economic philosophies, we use for good.
Thomas White:Because with a biblical worldview, we say we do this. We don't do that. We don't use image generation that results in pornographic or fake images to the harm of other human beings. But we utilize this as a tool that helps us translate the gospel into another language in thirty seconds so that we can share the gospel with them or communicate with them. There are good things that can come from this.
Thomas White:And to me, it's another arena. I want a gospel witness in every part of life. Yep. And this is an arena where I think we need to be gospel witnesses, which brings into my own mind an ethical question. We have a closed network.
Thomas White:So to parents and students, you're worried about your essays. It's a closed network. Doesn't train the open model. My ethical question is, do we have an ethical obligation to help train the open model? Should I put my theological positions into the open model because then I'm a witness in a dark place to help shape it away from being bent towards sinful nature, more towards being bent towards the truth of the gospel and scripture?
Thomas White:Do I have an obligation to let that happen? And if I happen to lose a little bit of copyright or whatever, which I don't think we will, but even if I do, who cares? Like, you get pennies on the word if you write a book anyway. So it's Treasures in heaven. We're that's right.
Thomas White:Where do where do we go with this? Well, let's be a witness. Let's move into it in such a way that we don't shy away from it. We're not scared of it. Think back to the Internet.
Thomas White:And when the Internet came online, you had people saying this is horrible. This is evil. This is not good. You had others who used it, and now you have gosh. I listened to how many sermons on podcast and on the Internet Mhmm.
Thomas White:Of faithful preachers and communicators. Our Bible Miner is online for free. People can tap into our chapels. This is all technology. Mhmm.
Thomas White:So how can we use AI in a similar way that's for God's glory and good and our joy, not for evil? And I think that's what we have to figure out. There's a way. We need all the best, brightest, God glorifying minds possible working to do this because I guarantee you, there are minds working to do it the other way.
Jared:Well, this was excellent. Yes. We appreciate you coming in, and sharing with us. I remember when I started here as a student, it was, Wi Fi was the new thing. And before that, we had know, we're the first campus one of the first campuses to put computers in dorm rooms, WebCT, and now we're adding generative AI, which is kinda making us, again, a very innovative campus in front of Yeah.
Jared:All these. It was really, really great.
Rob:Been a real pleasure. Thank you for taking the time.
Thomas White:It's my pleasure. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Ryan:Thanks for joining this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions about our episode with Doctor. White, please feel free to reach out to us via CTL podcast at cedarville.edu. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. Also, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog.
Ryan:Thanks for listening.